“Explain to me again why you’re marrying him?” I said. “He’s a total creep and raging misogynist to boot.” I stared at Lynn with set shoulders as I waited for her response. Lynn glared at me over the laptop. I met her gaze and refused to blink. Lynn was my best friend. We had known each other since kindergarten. We shared nearly everything in common, except our taste in boys. Rain pounded on the windows of the girl’s academic dormitory, and I could actually feel the wind shifting the building. Outside, lightning spiderwebbed across the sky, and then the thunder rattled the windows. I hadn’t had time to draw a breath between lightning and thunder. Lynn shook her head. “I’m marrying him because that’s how it is. That’s who I marry. Period. No way around it.” I picked up my wine glass and paused. Was it my wine glass? It couldn’t be Lynn’s. She was holding hers. But we were the last two girls standing tonight. Lindsay was asleep on the couch. We had held Sophie’s hair out of th...
A werewolf can kill you with a single scratch. Nine of every ten people wounded by a werewolf will contract lycanthropy. Of those, all but one in one hundred people infected will die of it rather than become a werewolf. Lycanthropy gestates in the body for roughly four weeks, give or take. Then symptoms manifest. It’s like rabies with extra teeth. Amber stared at the claw wounds on her calf and her forearm. Ugly red gashes across pale flesh, open and leaking blood. Then she stared at the dead werewolf ten feet to her right. Smoke drifted from a cavernous wound in its chest. Her bodyguard had unloaded silver grapeshot into the beast. The wound should hurt. Instead she felt numb. Twenty eight days, give or take, and then she would know if she would live or die. Then she would know if she was going to howl at the moon or curl up into a ball of pain as her body stopped working. She looked at what remained of the carriage and the castle guards assigned to go with her. The r...
I woke up lost in an enormous and luxurious four poster bed. I stretched, enjoying the feel of silk sheets against my skin. I lay, basking in the indulgence of my morning, until the reality of my situation landed on me like an avalanche. I bolted up to a sitting position. Whose bed was this? This couldn't be my bed. My bed was a dormitory special. It was a single sized bed with a mattress that might as well be cardboard. I looked around. I did not see my dorm room. I did not see the dorm common room where I last remembered sitting next to Lynn. Instead, I saw an opulent room decorated in a mix of regency and medieval styles. The styles clashed in strange ways. The walls were medieval brickwork overlaid with tapestries. The tops and bottoms of the brickwork were overlaid with crown molding. And the furniture was a mix of Victorian romance and crusader castle. The room looked gorgeous, but it made no sense. And then I noticed the next thing. I didn’t have a hangove...
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